Children’s acquisition of word order depends on syntactic/semantic role: Evidence from adjective-noun order
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on research on children’s verb production, Usage-Based theorists have argued that children learn grammatical abstractions in the preschool years. The fact that, in English verb clauses, word order determines semantic/syntactic roles leaves open the possibility that children are learning not just syntactic frames, but the relationship between order and semantic/syntactic roles. To clarify the nature of children’s abstract knowledge, we taught novel adjectives to English-speaking children (2 to 4 years), both prenominally and postnominally. Unlike verbs, adjective position in a sentence does not change the semantic/syntactic role of the adjective. Children showed sensitivity to the canonical order, but even four-year-olds frequently used novel adjectives postnominally. We argue that a strong motivation for ordering words grammatically is when order determines semantic/syntactic roles.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it